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1959
May 12th, 2016 01:00
PS6500E + 48 x 2 TB HDD + RAID 50 = 69.25TB??
Hi all,
New to the forums and also new to EqualLogic systems in general (replaced a senior staff member who passed away).
I was given the order to re-setup our EqualLogic system (PS6500E) with 48x 2TB HDD's.
If I am not mistaken we should have 96 TB (= 85.7 TiB) available according to all specifications I could find, however only 69.25 TB is available with RAID 10.
Can someone explain why I am only seeing 69.25 TB available instead of 96 TB?
I did notice 2 HDD's are spare, but still shouldn't that render 88 TB (= 82 TiB) available... Right?
A few things I checked myself;
- all 48 disks are recognised.
- all 48 disks are healthy and don't have errors
- running the latest firmware v8.1.1
Only thing I did notice is a low battery warning on controller 0, but that's charging now and I doubt it's causing the space "issue".
I did notice one thing in the "Event Log" As mentioned I created a RAID 50 array, but I saw this message: " Info 11-5-2016 16:31:25 PS6500E 14.2.4 Expanding drive array from 10 drives, RAID 10 to 14 drives, RAID 50."
Don't know if that message is of any importance.
Furthermore; there are currently 2 disks set as spare. Is it possible to set more disks as spare in general with EqualLogic?
I am very sorry if I am asking stupid questions, but as mentioned, I replaced a senior staff member (who suddenly passed away) and to be honest I have no experience at all with Equallogic in general. I guess it's a first time for everything.
Thank you in advance for your help and kind answers.
Regards
J.Versteegen
9 Posts
0
May 13th, 2016 01:00
Hi Donald,
Thank you for the detailed answer back. Really highly appreciated.
I was starting to think I was doing something wrong, because not all space was available.
So one final question; if I am not mistaken (please correct me if I am wrong). With RAID 6 (changed it from RAID 10 to RAID 6, because Dell recommends it). Though it will only show one spare in the Group Manager, it will have several spares for each group (which aren't visible in the GUI)? Is this correct? Or is there really only 1 spare disk?
[update while typing the above and re-reading your post]
You typed: "With R6 that becomes two drives PER RAIDset." As mentioned above I changed it from RAID 50 to RAID 6 (Dell's recommendations). If I understand it correctly there are several RAID sets, or am I mistaken here? I thought it was just one big RAID 6 array, but apparently I am wrong here?
Well I appreciate you saying I am not asking stupid questions; it's just kinda hard to dive into something new (or better said being forced into under sad circumstances, but I am trying the best I can with my limited knowledge).
The rest of your detailed answers explains the rest for me, so thank you.
Regards
J.Versteegen
9 Posts
0
May 18th, 2016 01:00
Thanks again for your answer Donald. Highly appreciated.
One final question; I couldn't find any information about this, so I think it does not matter much or I must have missed it.
We have the PS6500E, but it also requires some kind of front-end sever, right.
I did see something / somewhere a PowerEdge R710 being mentioned (don't recall where, but it was in some .PDF file).
Especially considering we run backup scripts from the front-end, so I guess all data will go through this front-end, or is rsync used in this? I presume the latter, but I am not sure.
Would a single quad-core server do, or dual quad-core system? I do understand one thing; 4 network ports are recommended though.
Sorry once again for my questions. But it's kinda hard to fill in someone's position this sudden. Especially considering he mainted these kind of things for the past 5+ years. It's like being dropped in the ocean in order to learn to swim... :|
J.Versteegen
9 Posts
0
May 19th, 2016 01:00
Thanks again Donald.
We are using the PS6500E for daily backup's of our servers. The old solution had a fibre-channel connection (if I am not mistaken it was 6 Gbit). But with the PS6500E we now have 4x 1 Gbit.
Is it possible to combine the ports to one connection? Through VLAN and/or trunking, or doesn't it work like that? Wouldn't be 1x 4 Gbit connection be faster than 4x 1 Gbit? Maybe I am thinking to difficult.
I managed to setup the iSCSI (formatted it and mounted it) and as far as I have found out the four NIC's are divided over the iSCSI volumes.
Sorry again for the noobish questions, but though I am actually making progress it's still kinda hard to wrap my head around this (everything still seems so new to myself).
//edit
One more question; just thought of this (and probably doesn't make much sense). We now have 6x volumes on the PS6500E, because of the 15 TB limit. This means we have 6x 11.5 TB volumes. Isn't it possible for us to have 1 big storage pool for our backups? So we have one pool of 69 TB. I did some searching but couldn't find any information on it, other than converting to a different filesystem (Btrfs).
However I have no clue if this is safe (I think so, because of the RAID 6 provided by the PS6500E), but will it have some kind of speed impact. We mainly one to use a single pool for our backups with the best available transfer speed.
Regards